Tag: environmental contamination

After having been rightly scorched for his stupidly false recent public statement that humankind’s behavior may not be a major contributor to global warming, EPA chief and oil industry hack Scott Pruitt has taken to discussing his views almost exclusively with media he trusts to lob him only frien...

The great majority of families in the rural United States, and many other families, besides, depend on water coming directly from the ground for their everyday living needs. The groundwater also furnishes an emergency supply of clean water all over the country, in the event of contamination of the p...

The FDA has just issued a warning that certain tests for lead in blood drawn from patients’ veins since 2014 may have falsely assured those patients that they were not suffering from lead contamination when, in fact, they were. The suspect tests were those typically conducted in doctors’ offices...

This blog is dedicated primarily to environmental issues, and so over the last four months, I have blogged with alarm and sadness and sometimes even anger as our new President has done everything within his power to dismantle the EPA–which is the primary federal agency for the protection of public...

The other shoe is dropping. We learned last week that EPA chief Scott Pruitt was firing his agency’s scientists—the ones who review scientific evidence and determine whether, for example, humans can tolerate less contamination in their drinking water than previously thought, or certain pesticide...

The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) is a federally funded organization which researches the impact on human health of various chemicals. In short, the ATSDR tells us what makes us sick. Below is a summary of what the ATSDR says about how certain dangerous chemicals threaten ...

The oil industry hack (Scott Pruitt) who was appointed by President Trump to head the EPA has just quietly fired half the members of the EPA’s Science Advisory Board. This is the group of highly-regarded and dedicated scientists who determine, for example, the dangers to human health threatened by...

Yes. You read that correctly. First, the State of Michigan and the City of Flint took away Flint residents’ clean water. Then they substituted lead-contaminated water. Now, the City of Flint has just sent notices to 8,000 Flint residents threatening that, if the residents don’t pay for the lead-...

Health researchers have long known that air pollution causes certain cancers and heart disease. With this in mind, the Healthgrove organization collected data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in order to identify the county in each state in the US with the worst air pollution. He...

The world is rushing head-long into ever greater dependence on dangerous man-made chemicals. We now accept these chemicals are a part of our everyday lives, at home, at work, in schools, etc. But, rather than just accept this as an unavoidable reality, we must pause for a moment to consider this chi...